Make Your Own iPhone Ringtones

If you have an iPhone, don't buy a ringtone. Just don't. It's not worth the money to pay to have a thirty-second clip of a song. If you have your favourite songs already in iTunes, it's very easy to just make your own ringtones from those songs by just using iTunes itself--no need to download any fancy sound editing programs or anything like that. I originally saw this here via Google News (it was a top story), which directed me here with a nice little tutorial. However, I felt that the tutorial lacked a few things and was a tad confusing for the average user. I'm posting my own version here. If you have any questions, just ask in the comments.

First, open iTunes and select the song you want to make into a ringtone. Right-click (control click on Mac laptops) and select "Get Info." Mac users, you can select the song and just do command-I.

Get the options tab in the window that opens as shown. Put in a start and stop time. The whole time must not exceed thirty seconds. For example, you could specify the start time to be 0:00 and the stop time to be 0:30 (or anything less). You could also have it start at 0:20 and end at 0:50. You get the idea. Click OK to save changes.



Right click on the song and select "Convert selection to AAC." Even if it's already in AAC format, you must do this. The song will be converted and duplicated, but will now be as short as the time specified before. Note: if your selection doesn't convert to AAC, you must go to iTunes--Preferences--Advanced--Importing and select "AAC Encoder" in the box next to "Import Using:".

Select the clipped song and export it from your library. On Mac, you can just drag it onto the desktop, but I don't know if Windows people can do this or not. You may have to export it via the File menu (File--Export).

Change the extension of the exported song to ".m4r" -- it should have been ".m4a" before. In both cases, the quotes are not actually in the extension--a song may be called Mozart.m4r. On Mac, your system will warn you about changing a file extension, but don't worry--nothing bad will happen.

Go to File--Import (or just do command-shift-O on Mac, and yes, that's the letter "O") and import the song. It should automatically go into the ringtones section of iTunes since this is the extension ringtones use.

Next time you sync your iPhone, your new ringtone should sync right over. To use it, go to the home screen, then Settings--Sounds--Ringtone and it should be right at the top under the word "Custom."

You may want to go back to the original song's info window you brought up earlier and uncheck the checkmarks next to start and stop time. Otherwise, every time that song plays, it will play within the confines you set earlier. You probably don't want that.

I hope that helps... I was so thrilled when I learned about this. I still think it's frightfully clever.